


Questions In Search of Answers

by rabid_plotbunny



Series: Stories from the WIP file [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Sephiroth whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24102970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabid_plotbunny/pseuds/rabid_plotbunny
Summary: Sephiroth wanted answers, and the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim might just harbor them.  Too bad the Mansion wasn't agreeing with him...
Series: Stories from the WIP file [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1739023
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	Questions In Search of Answers

**Author's Note:**

> Was going through my old WIP folder and came across this lovely. Though someone out there might enjoy it and hey, who knows? If someone does, it might kick-start this muse again... ❤

Consciousness slowly inflicted itself on Sephiroth and his eyes slid open only to be greeted by almost pitch darkness. He found himself lying on the ground, the surface smooth if somewhat gritty under his cheek. The cold it radiated seeped the heat from his body, leaving him chilled. Judging by the chill he felt, how low his temperature had already dropped, he had been lying there for some time. He moved to push himself up, but lay back down almost immediately as the pain that he had somehow been managing to ignore up until then took the opportunity to make its presence known. Quite enthusiastically.  
  
Everything hurt. From the top of his head down to his toes, it felt like he'd been mauled by Bahamut, and then trampled, and then possibly chewed on some more. For that matter, one leg felt like it was _still_ being chewed on. Lying still, the painful throbbing of his body was at least bearable. 

_What happened?_

Sephiroth lay his cheek back on the ground beneath him, the cool soothing against the intense throbbing in his head. Was he concussed? It was a definite possibility. Wonderful. Still, he struggled against the pain in his skull, wrestling with his reluctant memory as he tried to figure out where he was and what had happened to him.

A few long minutes later he was forced to give up with a frustrated grunt that sent a fresh wave of pain surging through his abused head. 

He couldn't remember anything after leaving Zack and the others at the inn. He'd known that Zack's little grunt friend had family in the tiny town and that he'd probably like to visit them. That Zack would most likely go along, even if only in a 'moral support' capacity. If he knew Zack at all, before they left he'd be almost like family.

Family. What would it be like...?

Oh.

Right.

That was it. 

He'd left the inn and headed for the outskirts of town, for the so-called 'Shinra Mansion'; a decrepit and falling-down remnant of the Company's former glory, now as visibly rotting as the Company was underneath the thin veneer of civility the media broadcasted. He'd been told — _by whom? He couldn't remember_ — that Hojo had had a lab hidden in there somewhere and had gone to find it, hoping against hope that he would find some papers, _something_ that would tell him who he was, where he had come from. Even his earliest memories took place in the lab. Surely, he'd been somewhere else at one time. Anywhere else. Somewhere else, with a family. A mother, maybe even a father, and a home. He wanted to know his past, who he was, and so he had gone looking for answers in the old, rotting depths of the Mansion.

Alone.

_Not my most brilliant decision_ , Sephiroth admitted. Worse, he couldn't tell now if he'd told anyone exactly where he was headed. He knew he hadn't wanted company, hadn't wanted anyone following him, so maybe he hadn't. And even worse, what if he'd been so set on solitude that he'd brushed them off with the lie of heading out for a solo recon of the area in terms of monster activity between the town and the reactor?

Sinkingly, that last one had come a bit too easily to mind for comfort. 

Great. So even if they _had_ missed him, or would shortly, they would be heading off in entirely the wrong direction.

_And you're the brilliant strategist and tactician that brought Wutai to its knees? I. Think. Not._

So. The question now became: Had he actually made it to the mansion, or had he gotten side-tracked?

Before he could ponder that for too long, he was shaken from his thoughts as a drop of water — at least, he _hoped_ it was water — dripped from some unknown source to land with a chilly wet plop on the side of his nose. He wrinkled his nose at the tiny impact, then more as it slowly worked its way across the bridge of his nose to slide down his face.

Wonderful.

He squirmed a little, only to freeze as even that slight motion was enough to send a spike of flaming pain shooting up his leg, up his side, shooting even up the side of his neck and down that arm. Only the knowledge that to vocalize anything would only treble the pain in his throbbing head kept him even remotely quiet.

All right. Moving was _bad_. Or at least, moving his _leg_ was bad. _Very_ bad.

One arm was pinned and twisted awkwardly beneath him, but the other was simply lying beside him. Cautiously he lifted it, alert for any twinges that would indicate that it should be put down _immediately_. Nothing. Slowly, he reached down, running his hand down over his hip, his thigh. Grateful that he wasn't lying stretched out, which meant that the rest of his leg might actually be _in reach_ , he let his hand slide further down. Not much further, though, as it quickly found the source of the pain; the jagged end of _something_ sticking up through the leather of his pants, not too far above the knee.

An almost sick feeling settled in his stomach at the mere thought that it could be bone, that he might be _stuck_ there until he somehow managed to set it and let it heal or the others managed to find him despite his own efforts at sabotaging such an occurrence.

Raising his hand to his face, he took the end of one finger in his teeth, pulled his hand free of the glove. There was only one way to find out.

He lowered his hand back to his leg, felt the smooth leather damp under his fingers. A quick sniff at his fingers told him that it was blood. A lot of blood.

Shit.

If he was bleeding badly, his first priority had to be to get it stopped, no matter how the rest of him might protest. 

Wait. Hadn't he brought along his Heal materia? A quick glance down at his bracelet showed him a mangled piece of metal, the slots twisted and deformed, the Materia popped free and missing. A wide-eyed glance around in the darkness revealed only one faintly-glowing orb in sight. Unfortunately, it was Fire and not much use at the moment, even if he _could_ somehow get to it.

Then again, it might be a good idea to get it anyway. He'd had to fight monsters in the mansion so he knew there were probably some near by. Though they might have been scared away by the sound of... whatever had happened to leave him in that state, doubtless the fear would be fading by the minute and the scent of blood would draw them like flies.

A sudden thought occurred to him. _Where was the Masamune?_ He'd been carrying it; he _knew_ he'd been carrying it. So where was it?

He looked around again, but even with his eyes slowly becoming adjusted to the deep darkness, he didn't see any sign of it. Maybe it was behind him somewhere. It couldn't have gotten far.

Deciding to leave that for later as his leg twinged at a shiver he couldn't contain, he focused once more on his damaged limb. His bare hand slid down, down, the blood slick beneath his fingers. Then he felt torn leather. He braced himself, then reached for the wound.

_Please not bone, please not bone_ , he repeated in silent mantra. _Please not bone_.

Luck was with him. In a way. His fingers found the protrusion, danced delicately over it, though not delicately enough to avoid hot spikes of _oww_. It wasn't bone. It seemed to be a large shard of wood, in rather questionable shape.

Lovely. Well, his leg wasn't broken, but it was impaled by a chunk of wood of unknown origin and doubtful cleanliness. Wouldn't it just we the icing on the cake if he caught something from it, or the dirtiness of the wood let the wound go septic?

Another drop of hopefully-water landed on his nose, slid slowly down his face.

Right. So, now that he knew what was wrong with his leg, it was time to tend to it. It was something he'd done before; pulling foreign objects out of bodies for medical treatment, but it had never been _his_ body before. He could honestly say that outside of the lab, he'd never been hurt as much as he was just then.

Slowly, knowing that any sudden movement was a _bad_ thing for his head right then, he lifted his head up off of the floor, only to let out a strangled yelp and lay back down as it slammed into something hard and unmoving far too soon. Lifting his hand back up to head-level, he slowly lifted it.

Barely six inches up, his fingers touched what felt like a mess of wood and stone. He moved his hand lower down his body, finding that the distance from his body to the debris didn't increase. In fact, it seemed to _decrease_ the further down his body he got. He brought his hand back up to chest-height and tried pushing against the obstruction, but it didn't move even a little.

_It's a miracle I wasn't crushed_ , he realized, the thought chilling. Dying was bad enough. Dying alone was worse. Dying alone with the possibility of being found practically nil thanks to his own stupidity...

He tried not to think about it.

Well, tiny space or not, he _had_ to tend to his leg. That chunk of wood had to come out, the blood flow had to be stemmed, and the wound itself needed to be bandaged.

_Oh, is that all...?_

Some creative twisting and a few choice curses later — he knew Zack would be astonished to hear him, surprised that he even _knew_ those words, even though he was a soldier and a SOLDIER just like him — he managed to get his other arm out from underneath him, get himself turned onto his side as much as possible. After that he rested, panting, pain-sweat beading cold on his brow, waiting for the feeling to come back to his sleeping limb.

Lying there, waiting for the feeling to return to his arm, he once again wrestled with his reluctant memory for the answer to the question of how exactly he had ended up where he was. Wherever that was.

He had passed through Nibelheim, he could remember that now, had made it unremarked out to the edge of the little town to the place they called the 'Shinra Mansion'. He remembered the sturdy, if rusting, metal fence with its forbidding gate chained shut and locked with a bulky padlock. Ignoring the signs telling people to keep out or face persecution from Shinra, and likewise ignoring the gate that would undoubtedly squeal loudly enough to rouse the town even if he _did_ have the key, Sephiroth took a look around, searching. Once he was satisfied that he was alone and unwatched, he backed up a few steps, then jumped.

His booted feet landed with catlike grace on the weather-worn path on the other side of the fence and he made his way up the weed-eaten walk to the decrepit stairs leading to the Mansion's door. He didn't have the key, but a little application of SOLDIER strength had the knob turning anyway and the door swung open on surprisingly silent hinges.

He'd actually rather expected them to let out an eerie groan to match the appearance of the place.

Maybe he'd listened to a few too many of Zack's ghost stories.

Most of the windows boarded up, it was dark inside. Not enough to seriously hinder him, or to hide the decayed splendor of the place, but just enough that he had to keep just _that_ much more alert for anything that might be running around in there. Just because the door had been locked didn't mean the place was uninhabited.

And he was right.

He could remember now, he hadn't been all the way up the half-fallen stairway when the first monster had attacked. After that, it seemed like it was just one after the other after the other, with barely a chance to breathe in between attacks. At least they were mostly low-level monsters and easy enough to go through, even if there _were_ a lot of them.

And just _where_ were they all _coming_ from?

He remembered searching the upstairs, knowing that there was a hidden passageway up there somewhere that would end up in the basement, in Hojo's supposedly 'secret' lab that apparently everyone knew about. He wanted to see if the man had left anything behind, duplicate notes, perhaps, that might tell him who he was. Where he had come from. If he had something resembling family out there somewhere, and if so, how he had ended up in Shinra's posession. 

Had he been given up willingly? Had he been stolen? Were his parents still alive? Who were they? What were they like? 

Would they like him, who he was, who Hojo and Shinra made him?

Maybe he'd been listening to too many of Zack's stories, period. He knew he'd never wondered such things before the insane brunet wedged his way into his life. He'd been resigned to his lot in life, to his role as a puppet for Shinra's greed. But after listening to so many of Zack's stories about 'Back home, in Gongaga...' after hearing so many from Angeal and Genesis, he wanted to know. Wanted to know if there was something like that for him out there.

He had found the passageway, mentally rolling his eyes at the stupidity of its hiding place. Way to go, Hojo! Because a lone unfinished brick wall on the second floor of an otherwise fully finished — elegant and ostentatious, even! — mansion was _completely_ inconspicuous.

Maybe the scientist should have put up a sign, too: 'Secret Passage to Hidden Lab Is Not Here. Check the Basement.'

He had found the trigger easily enough, there being enough wear around it from many years of use — he shuddered to think of _what_ Hojo would have been doing in those years. What had been done to _him_ was bad enough! — and triggered it. The wall slid open with only the smallest stony grating and he was greeted by a stale gust of chill air from inside the passage.

There was a light switch just inside the passage and he flicked it, unsurprised when it worked, lighting a series of lights that showed him a sadly-decaying wooden stair. More light from a doorway at the bottom revealed that the lights had also been lit further on. Though the lights in the rest of the house were dead, the power long since cut, the labs had always had their own power sources; many things that were contained therein were _not_ things that you wanted running around in the event of a simple power failure.

He remembered walking to the head of the stairs that curled around the wall leading downwards, the center left open on a three-floor drop to the basement level. Remembered reaching for the railing, only to have it crumble under his hand, a victim of time and dry rot.

Thus warned, he had decided to stick as close to the walls as he could, since the occasional stone sticking out of the wall to support the staircase gave him at least a little better chance of reaching the bottom without collapsing the entire thing.

He remembered his slow creep down, placing each step with the utmost care and caution.

And then—

And then, care and caution hadn't been enough.

He remembered how his foot had gone right through the next step in a burst of splinters and wood-dust. Unbalanced, he had fallen, taking out several more stairs on that level before crashing through the next turn entirely. He remembered how he had drawn the Masamune, managed to plunge the blade into the stone-lined wall enough to stop his fall, leaving him dangling there a few feet above the next turn of stairs, unsure as to how exactly he was supposed to get down to them, let alone how he was going to get back _up_ after.

Remembered how that was the moment the stairs decided to give in to the ravages of time, monsters, and dry rot and collapse. Remembered looking up at the loud groan overhead, only to be greeted with what seemed like a ton of falling wood, along with stone tugged from the gash his sword had made in the wall.

_Well, that explains that_ , he thought with an irritated sigh. He was trapped underneath the wreckage of the stairs.

...Which meant that even if the others went to the Mansion looking for him, they would have no way to get to him. Provided of course that they could find the obvious 'secret' passage, the mechanism that opened it, and see that the damage to the stairs was recent.

_Wonderful_.

Well, there was nothing he could do about that now. His first priority, as he had already decided, had to be tending to his wounded leg before he did something inconceivably stupid. Like ignore it long enough for him to bleed out.

Satisfied that enough feeling had returned to his arm that he could use it, though it still burned and throbbed with pins-and-needles, he moved both hands to his leg to feel the extent of the wound. Right. Bad enough, but he could deal with it. But before he pulled the wood out, he needed something to bandage it with. And perhaps also something to use as a tourniquet. Yes. He couldn't believe he would have forgotten something _that_ basic.

Well, for a tourniquet, he supposed he could use one of the buckled straps from his boots. He didn't really _need_ the one above the knee, after all.

Right. One down. Now, what did he have for a bandage?

For the first time since his last trip to the lab, he cursed his lack of a shirt. If he'd had one, he could have torn it up into strips and used _that_. Great. Well, what else did he have? His coat? Somehow, he doubted the thick leather would work very well as a bandage. Oh, but wait! It _was_ lined. Maybe he could cut a little off the bottom of the lining...

Cut. With _what_ , exactly? There wasn't enough room to use the Masamune even if he had known where it was. Wait. He reached down into the top of the boot of his unhurt leg and _ha, yes!_ pulled out a little boot-dagger, a gift from Genesis back in one of the first years they had been friends. Back when they _had_ been friends. It was a bit small to be very practical in battle, but as a last-resort weapon, it was priceless.

A bit more wriggling, teeth clenched against the pain that raced up his side every time his leg was jostled, and he managed to get the lower half of his coat up to where he could get at it. A few sure slices later and he held a set of makeshift bandages.

Sephiroth managed to tug the knot of the makeshift bandage tight, though his fingers were slick with blood and his hands shook, then collapsed back to the floor, his breath coming in harsh pants as he finally allowed himself to react to the near-blinding pain that had shot through him as first he pulled the chunk of wood from his injured leg, then as he wrapped the wound as tightly as he could manage. The pain made him want to throw up but he forced it down. Until he rested, until he could see just where he was trapped and if there was any way out, he couldn't afford to soil what might be his only living space.

Many long minutes later - he didn't know how many; his sense of time was completely shot, due in no small part to the incessant pounding in his head - he decided that he had rested enough and that it was time to find out _exactly_ what he was dealing with.

And retrieve that Fire Materia while he was at it.

Right, then.

He turned his head to look above him. His eyes had adjusted to the dark as well as they were going to and if it was nowhere near as clear as it would have been with even a minimal light source, he could at least make out the major details.

As he had felt before, there was _maybe_ six inches of space over his head, then what appeared to be mostly pieces of wood, mixed with stone and brick. He turned his head a little more then froze, a chill rushing through him as he came to the abrupt realization of just how close he had come to death.

He had found the Masamune.

Or at least, a section of the blade portion; the hilts buried in the rubble above. The blade itself was cold against the back of his neck, threatening to cut him on that razor-sharp edge should he turn his head even a _little_ bit more. If it had landed an inch closer, it would have sliced clean through his spine and he would never have awakened.

Carefully turning his head away, he pulled himself a little ways from the gleaming blade and, consequently, that much closer to the Fire Materia.

He could see now that there was a bigger space in that direction, or if not all that wider, at least it was tall enough that he would be able to sit up, perhaps even stand.

The Materia was gone.


End file.
